‘The Devil All the Time’ First Look: Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland Star in Netflix’s Explosive Gothic

Ryan Lattanzio

Updated August 4, 2020 at 3:41 AM·3 min read

Antonio Campos’ first feature as a director since 2016’s “Christine,” “The Devil All the Time” arrives on Netflix September 16. Adapted from the novel by Donald Ray Pollock, it’s a harrowing Appalachian gothic with an all-star cast: Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Haley Bennett, Harry Melling, Eliza Scanlen, Mia Wasikowska, and Robert Pattinson. The streaming platform has dropped official first look photos. See below.

Here’s the official synopsis: “In Knockemstiff, Ohio and its neighboring backwoods, sinister characters — an unholy preacher (Robert Pattinson), twisted couple (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough), and crooked sheriff (Sebastian Stan) — converge around young Arvin Russell (Tom Holland) as he fights the evil forces that threaten him and his family. Spanning the time between World War II and the Vietnam war, director Antonio Campos’ ‘The Devil All the Time’ renders a seductive and horrific landscape that pits the just against the corrupted. Co-starring Bill Skarsgård, Mia Wasikowska, Harry Melling, Haley Bennett, and Pokey Lafarge, this suspenseful, finely-woven tale is adapted from Donald Ray Pollock’s award-winning novel.”

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The novel portrays a religious community who take their faith to often horrific extremes. While the movie is set in Ohio and West Virginia, it was actually shot in Alabama. “It was a challenging shoot just because there were so many locations and we were really spread out over a large portion of northern Alabama,” Campos told Entertainment Weekly. “The nice thing is Alabama hasn’t been filmed in very often, so it’s not as recognizable as some other places that have been filmed in and photographed thoroughly by various films and TV shows.”

The screenplay was written by Campos with his brother Paulo. “It was a hard book to adapt also because there was so much that we loved,” the director told EW. “I’m a big fan of southern gothic and noir and this was a perfect marriage of the two. Sometimes you might be adapting a piece and you think like, Well, there is a seed of a good idea here and I’ll just throw everything away and start from scratch. In this case it was like, we love everything!”

Earlier this summer, co-star Eliza Scanlen spoke with IndieWire about “The Devil All the TIme” during an interview. “This film is about the ways people struggle with their faith, and how they define faith for themselves and what it leads them to do. We see in this film very extreme depictions of this struggle,” Scanlen said. “It was only a 10-day shoot, but it was filled to the brim with really tricky scenes and a really tricky storyline to fill amongst other people’s storylines. It was definitely a test in stamina.”